[Gpdd] MISCELLANEOUS: Question marks and other odd characters

[Admin]

The following are the results of a question we asked of a small group of 
GPDD members.  If you have any suggestions to add, we would welcome them 
too.  If it were possible, we would love to "fix" this "technical" 
problem if we could.

QUESTION:  Where or What or Why do some posts show Question Marks???  If 
anyone has any other suggestions or ideas or maybe some real computer 
expertise on this, we would love to hear from all of you.

We do have one member who is using a Reader to listen to the daily 
digest posts.  It has to be so annoying when the Reader is reading a 
question when it is really is NOT a question!

A BIG Thank You to all Members who gave or have given or will give their 
opinions.   This is not a promise to fix anything.  Just some ideas from 
Members with ideas.  If one person gets an idea from the following 
thoughts to stop their marks from showing up in their digest 
post..........it would have been worth the effort.  Rather than clog up 
the Digest, we will ask you to send your suggestions to:
*
Moderator.kc at gpdd.org*.
Subject:  Question Marks.

We will publish all the suggestions once all the  results are in.  Here 
are the first few ideas.

............The question marks usually come up when there is some kind 
of character misinterpretation. For example, if I use a letter with an 
accent on it (like you get all the time in French), it might not show up 
properly on someone else's computer. People whose posts are coming 
through with question marks should check what font they are writing 
their messages in, and people who are receiving posts with question 
marks in them should check what font they are viewing messages in. Using 
strange fonts is usually the culprit, though not always. If it's a font 
problem, changing to something that is more universal (e.g., Times, 
Verdana) will fix this. If that doesn't fix the problem, then it's a 
different reason and I'm afraid I am also at a loss.

............I have seen question marks in posts when I read them on my 
phone, sometimes.  I have seen question marks inserted, sometimes, when 
a post was made from a phone.

..............I have noticed in a post the text does not go to the end 
of the page on the right side.  So I wonder if the member might be using 
the enter button instead of allowing the program to just use it's own 
wordwrap function.?  Maybe this is what is causing the ??? marks in her 
post? There is a ? at the beginning or end of each paragraph.  Sometimes 
people are used to their typewriters and will just hit the enter button 
sort of like when they used to hit the carriage return handle.  The line 
of ??? is a spacebar moving across a page?  Just my thoughts.  Hope this 
helps.

.................I was wondering about them, too. The only thought I 
have had as I've seen these appear in some posts but not others is 
whether some people are using some sort of character that does not 
translate across platforms and/or countries? For instance, there was a 
while where whenever I received emails from my sister I was getting 
these weird J-like characters appearing here and there through out her 
email. Much later, I realized (somehow, I've forgotten how) that she was 
using a rich text or html type of fancy emoticon that was part of her 
email program which my email program (at the time anyway) couldn't 
interpret and so whenever it happened, a J-like character was 
substituted. Although everyone on the list corresponds in English, there 
are different keyboards and language programs (right term?) for people 
in countries who's main language is other than English. I don't know if 
even a space bar tap or double tap from such a program creates this 
problem. I wonder if there any correlation between ESL communicators of 
certain languages and/or email providers and the question mark issue?

............If the ??? marks only happen in the full digest mode, maybe 
it is a program the full digest is using and the singles don't use?

.............You want to know the answer to the question (why there are 
question marks?)
Our browsers reproduces the results of keystrokes (letters and symbols) 
based on an international standard called the Unicode Transformation 
Format. Not only does it keep track of the letters and symbols, but the 
fonts (Arial, Times, serif, sans-serif, etc.) used to create those 
words. The current standard is UTF-8

The UTF encoding is supposed to make sure that whatever I type on my 
computer (to send as e-mail, a blog post, a Digest post or a web 
comment) looks exactly how I typed it when you see it.  All well and 
good, but not all programs and fonts are created 100% compatible - not 
even Microsoft. When a browser (or program using UTF to decode 
characters) encounters a character it doesn't recognize, it will 
substitute a character - usually a question mark - "?" - in its place. 
The "usual suspects" for Unicode glitches are quotation marks, a hard 
return, dashes ("em" and "en" dashes").

Ok, that makes sense so far - but what about the instances where some 
people see question marks and others see the character that was 
intended? The explanation for that is that for whatever reason, not all 
browsers are set to decode UTF-8.

While that isn't the only reason question marks show up in odd places, 
it's the most common :)

Thanks! We look forward to hearing from you.

The GPDD Team